For the last three decades, Canadian governments, at the federal and provincial level, have been turning education into a business increasingly accessible only to the wealthy.

I sat down several weeks ago with four student representatives at Okanagan College in my home town, Salmon Arm. I asked them what they were studying and why.

Every single one said they had abandoned their dreams of studying what really interested them, instead choosing a field where they thought they had a better chance of making money.

Each had a slice of the crushing national student debt, now close to $15 billion, hanging over their heads: for university graduates in Canada, the average debt-load is close to $27,000.

Higher education, a debtor's prison?

Post-high school education, for Canada’s young people, has turned an entire generation into candidates for a debtor’s prison, indentured servants whose career futures are inextricably bound to the money they owe. With few exceptions, our national leaders appear unmoved by the concept of an educated citizenry being a national asset. There are hardly any musings on learning more about the world, or the excitement of discovery about oneself and others.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s answer to alarming levels of student debt is to pile on more, through his Canada Apprentice Loan initiative, which will add another $200 million to the debt load of students in skilled trades. Contrast this to the recent proposal by President Obama, that the first two years of college education should be free.

Or compare this to countries like Cuba, where – despite all the criticism of Fidel Castro – education has been free up to the doctoral level for decades.

This helped Cuba to survive the collapse of the Soviet Union’s support in 1989, and develop, almost overnight, into a world-leading position in large-scale organic farming.

While most OECD countries have been maintaining or increasing their support for students, Canada’s has been slipping – from 80 per cent coverage of fees to 57 per cent in the last 20 years.

One country stands out, however, as a model for a new commitment to education: Chile.

The Chilean example

Three years ago, Chilean students went on strike for eight months over the lack of financial support for education, compounded by the emergence of elite and expensive private colleges and universities under murderous dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Government crackdowns only increased public and international support, and eventually the conservative and authoritarian regime of former President Sebastian Piñera was swept aside and the progressive Michelle Bachelet won a decisive mandate in 2013.

One of her first acts, finally signed into law last September, was to make education free for all students by the year 2020.

She did this by increasing corporate taxes for the richest corporations from 20 per cent to 25 per cent, which is something Stephen Harper has repeatedly said will ruin the economy.

But there is no evidence that the Chilean economy has, in fact, suffered at all.

Bachelet also took another equally important step.

She rolled back the private educational institutions that flourished under the brutal Pinochet regime, and were continued by Piñera, his conservative successor.

Here’s where Canada’s situation today and the system in Chile under former dictator Augusto Pinochet’s rule become eerily similar.

Both exist in taxation systems that favour corporate profitability over all other concerns. Both foster crippling student debt loads. Both encourage private, for-profit education.

But for-profit education is like for-profit drinking water – no money, no drink. It treats learning like a consumer product. For-profit education is also vulnerable to unaccountable private mismanagement.

This made news headlines a few weeks ago when Everest College, an Ontario-based “private career college” with 14 sites, and partially funded by the provincial government, had its government stipend cut off because Ontario stated it could no longer be “financially responsible” for the private corporation’s operation.

What news stories did not reveal was that Everest Colleges is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Corinthian Colleges Inc., a very large US company in the education business.

Corinthian’s unsavoury behaviour – misleading students from vulnerable low-income groups, encouraging heavy loan indebtedness, and creating difficulty around credit transfers to and from other institutions – had led to a decade-long battle with the law, now culminating in a major student legal action.

Here's a question. Should young people, who are beginning the training for their working lives, be victims of the vagaries of unscrupulous, for-profit corporations?

Canada had its own student strikes in Québec in 2012. Miscontrued by many as a protest against a fee hike, the pivotal issue was in fact student debt.

In Québec, student fees average a bit less than half what they are in the rest of Canada – $2500 vs $5700.

The student debt in Québec is also half: $13,000 vs $27,000. Students, and a large proportion of the Québecois population in general, were protesting against falling into the debt trap prevalent elsewhere in the country, created by sharply reduced federal transfer payments.

Given the vicissitudes of Canadian politics, where Québec governments have argued for being independent from the rest of the country, this struggle has not yet caught on from coast to coast. But it should.

Canadian college and university education is still dominated by a stunning lack of support at the federal and most provincial levels, and a corresponding blight of debilitating student indebtedness.

College and university administrators, wary of biting the government hand that feeds them, have tried to adapt in their own way, by taking on “contract academic staff” – hired teachers paid at a markedly lower rate than regular professors (e.g. about $30,000 vs $125,000), given no benefits (vs. a pension, sabbaticals, money for travel and research), and made to reapply for a job every year (vs. multi-year or permanent jobs).

But this move has done little to lighten the debt load that students bear, because most Canadian governments continue to view education, from top to bottom, as a for-profit, free-enterprise endeavour.

Private training colleges abound, and there are 18 private universities, offering programs for fees triple or quadruple the fees in public institutions.

While average university fees outside Québec and Newfoundland (both provinces that have bucked the trend – the latter, brilliantly, with grants instead of loans ) are about $5700, fees at a private university like BC’s Trinity Western University are $22,260.

In a recent, peculiarly retrograde move, the BC government has just decided that a student lacking Grade 12 who wants to go back to school in order to get higher training will be charged for the privilege to do so.

It has also decided that new immigrants to Canada who hope to improve their command of English will now also have to pay for that privilege as well.

In Chile, students went on strike, and now they have an educational system that treats them like valued citizens, not political cannon fodder. In Québec, students went on strike, and the government that wanted to raise their fees by 75 per cent was voted out, and its replacement has dropped the fee increase.

Newfoundland now has one of the most supportive programs of financial aid for students in the country, in large measure because student advocacy is unusually strong in that province.

I think students should strike, and stay out on strike and do all sorts of imaginative public relations stunts (the Chileans did a “kiss-in” – that sounds pretty innocuous) until either the government changes its treatment of Canada’s future generations, or a new government comes in that will. And Canadians who are not students should support them in their efforts.